Teacher Notes

Teacher Notes for Phase 1:

• As a teacher, being visibly aware of one’s own blind spots is important. Exploring one’s own assumptions, blind spots and implicit associations is a difficult ongoing process. It takes time and effort, and is best facilitated by setting an example. Acknowledging the existence of one’s own blind spots as a teacher can be helpful, as well as actively and vocally resisting stereotyping and categorisation.

• Explicitly inviting students to correct assumptions or uninclusive language demonstrates that this is a learning process for everyone, including the teacher.

• Making sure that creating a safe learning environment is a collaborative process, giving room to all students to contribute what they need for it to be safe. In order to maintain a safe learning environment for all students, it is very important to stress that students are free to only share what they are comfortable with. Having the option to not share a reflection, or only sharing in small groups or dyads also helps maintaining safety.

• Since the processes described above are not without challenges, it can be helpful to set up peer feedback group within faculties amongst colleagues to discuss these challenges in a safe setting. These groups can for example be supervised by an expert.

• Evaluating and examining one’s own “openness” or examine one’s own implicit associations as a teacher can be done by for example a questionnaire on cultural competence (MPQ test by van der Zee et al) or an Implicit Association test (i.e. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/).

Suggestions for assessment or evaluation:

In this phase, assessment will be formative and mostly meant for both students and teachers to gain insight in the learning process towards the goals described above. Some examples of evaluation or formative assessment could be:

• Evaluation of learning climate by using student’s feedback (i.e. ‘What do you need more of? What less? What are you doing to contribute to a safe learning environment?’)
• Asking students to answer a question on a test from another point of view, or give one another approach to a problem.